OSS license 101

December 10th, 2016Hideki Yamane <henrich@debian.org>

Disclaimer: IANAL & Eng”r”ish ;)

See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IANAL

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engrish

License = Allow **some** rights

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Software license

Depends on "©"

And relates to other layers...

Patent

Trademark

Contract

Patent

“ 3. Grant of Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of

this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual,

worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable

(except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made,

use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work,

where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable

by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their

Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s)

with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If You

institute patent litigation against any entity (including a

cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work

or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct

or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses

granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate

as of the date such litigation is filed.”

Trademark

“Firefox” and Iceweasel

Contract

Red Hat エンタープライズ契約書https://www.redhat.com/licenses/APAC_Enterprise_Agreement_WebVersion_Japan_20160330.pdf

Choose License

Depends on Your purpose

No “Best and Greatest” license

"Full-scratch" license?

OSS license = well-tested library

Software license = library written in natural language

Domain specific knowledge (law)

License = protocol

Compatibility issue

Don't create new protocol until you **really** need it

Productivity

Time investmentwriting Natural language(Legal Term) vs writing code

Proprietary license vs OSS license

Default deny vs Default allow

Whitelist vs Blacklist

The Open Source Definition(https://opensource.org/osd-annotated)

1 . Free Redistribution

2 . Source Code

3 . Derived Works

4 . Integrity of The Author's Source Code

5 . No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

6 . No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

7 . Distribution of License

8 . License Must Not Be Specific to a Product

9 . License Must Not Restrict Other Software

1 0 . License Must Be Technology-Neutral

DFSG-free(OSS), OSI-Certified and fake

DFSG-free(OSS)

OSI-Certified fake-OSS

Well-known OSS license

● GPL-{2,3}, AGPL● LGPL-{2.1,3}● MIT/BSD-{2,3}-clause● Apache-2.0 ● MPL● Etc…

OSI approval license = more than 60

Which license is best?

Not sure ;) - Depends on usage and purpose

Same as Library/Framework/Language

No “Best and Greatest”

Point of view

Copyleft vs Permissive

Patent-free or not

Domain-specfic

Copyleft vs Permissive

Copyleft : GPL,CDDL,MPL, etc.

Permissive : MIT,BSD-{2,3}-clause, etc.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.ja.html

Patent-free or not

GPL-3,Apache-2.0, MPL

Domain-specfic

OFL,CC,GFDL, etc.

License casual talk :)

Zstd (https://github.com/facebook/zstd)

BSD-3-clause licenseHowever, its "PATENTS" file says

" The license granted hereunder will terminate, automatically and without notice,

if you (or any of your subsidiaries, corporate affiliates or agents) initiate

directly or indirectly, or take a direct financial interest in, any Patent

Assertion: (i) against Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or corporate

affiliates, (ii) against any party if such Patent Assertion arises in whole or

in part from any software, technology, product or service of Facebook or any of

its subsidiaries or corporate affiliates, or (iii) against any party relating

to the Software. Notwithstanding the foregoing, if Facebook or any of its

subsidiaries or corporate affiliates files a lawsuit alleging patent

infringement against you in the first instance, and you respond by filing a

patent infringement counterclaim in that lawsuit against that party that is

unrelated to the Software, the license granted hereunder will not terminate

under section (i) of this paragraph due to such counterclaim."

Zfs (GPL vs CDDL) by Canonical, Ltd.

We cannot sue them, since we are not copyright holder: only Oracle can do so.

GPL

Linux "T-800" issue